Girl Most Likely by Max Allan Collins

Published by Thomas & Mercer on April 1, 2019

The villain of Girl Most Likely is you, given that part of the novel is written in the second person. That almost never works and this novel is no exception. In this case, the “you” is a murderer, which didn’t seem convincing to me because I know for a fact that I have never murdered anyone.

You meet Sue and ask her not to talk about what happened in the past. She won’t commit to silence, so you stab her to death. That was probably your plan regardless of her answer. But who are you? If you care, you need to read to the end to discover your identity.

The story adopts the third person when it introduces the protagonist, Galena Chief of Police Krista Larson, the youngest female police chief in the country. Her father was a celebrated cop, she broke up with her reporter boyfriend, etc. Krista is a bundle of stereotypes. A high school reunion (Krista’s class) is coming to Galena, minus a woman named Sue, who was murdered in Florida.

After meandering through the first third of the novel, the plot focuses on a female reporter who was once the victim of sexual abuse. The reporter is apparently working on a story about sexual misconduct. She is reunited at the reunion with a man who abused her (the unidentified “you” of the chapters written in second person). The encounter leads to a crime that Krista is called upon to investigate, one that echoes the Florida murder of another classmate.

Krista and her dad solve the mystery, not by piecing together clues in an interesting way but by badgering people who attended the reunion until one of them says something that makes the killer’s identity reasonably clear. That’s an accurate reflection of police work but it isn’t very interesting. And that pretty much sums up my reaction to Girl Most Likely.

I generally like Max Allen Collins’ books — I particularly enjoy what he’s done as a successor to Mickey Spillane — but Girl Most Likely is uncharacteristically dull. Perhaps that’s because it is set in Galena, a city that fails to inspire excitement. Collins tries to work in a couple of action scenes, but they are predictable and do nothing to supply the novel with the energy it lacks.

The relationship between Krista and her father is typical of cop-father, cop-daughter thriller relationships. Neither character has enough pizazz to make me care about them. But they constantly make clear that they love and admire each other, and that is apparently meant to warm a reader’s heart. I prefer meaningful characterization to fuzzy heartedness.

Collins is a capable writer and there are readers who like dull mysteries with sweet protagonists. I’m not in that audience. Girl Most Likely isn’t bad enough to condemn, but I have serious reservations about recommending it to fans of Collins’ better novels or, for that matter, to most crime novel readers.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Executive Order by Max Allan Collins

Published by Thomas & Mercer on April 11, 2017

Executive Order is the last of a trilogy involving largely unrelated stories that focus on the three branches of government. The first two are Supreme Justice and Fate of the Union.

I’m not generally a fan of “massive conspiracy of hidden government employees in all branches of government who plan an overthrow” novels, unless they were written decades ago by Robert Ludlum or Fredrick Forsythe. The subgenre has pretty well run its course and it is increasingly difficult to believe that the self-proclaimed “patriots” who would engage in such a conspiracy are capable of ordering lunch at a drive-thru, much less organizing hundreds of conspirators at the highest levels of government (and keeping it all a secret). Executive Order isn’t a particularly plausible conspiracy novel, for exactly those reasons, but I enjoyed it anyway.

In 2031, the Russians are threatening to invade Azbekistan and the CIA has sent four operatives to watch. They get caught in a firefight, which cheeses off President Harrison, who ordered the CIA not to send operatives into the potential war zone. Harrison wants to know who violated his orders by sending CIA operatives to die.

The answer involves a conspiracy to provoke a war with Russian on the ground that Harrison is a “tepid” president who will not take action unless he is forced to do so by right-thinking patriots who do not feel bound by the constraints of democracy or morality. To that extent, the novel has political overtones and might not be appreciated by readers who believe that defending freedom means taking it away from everyone they don’t like.

Realizing he can’t trust the CIA director or the military, the president asks Joe Reeder to find out who would be so foolish as to want to start a needless war with Russia. Meanwhile, Reeder believes that the Secretary of the Interior, who died of a food allergy, was murdered. He passes that tip along to Patti Rogers, who needs to find and solve a high-profile crime to assure that her elite FBI unit will continue to be funded.

With that background established, Reeder and Rogers and a handful of good guys begin an action-filled race to learn the truth before full-scale war breaks out. The plot isn’t special — it’s a little late in the day for a conspiracy novel to feel special, unless it contains original elements that Executive Order lacks — but it moves quickly, the action scenes are mostly credible, and the Reeder/Rogers team is an easy one to like.

Sometimes a novel that requires a small number of heroic figures to defeat overwhelming numbers of adversaries with military training are fun and sometimes they’re preposterous. Executive Order is both. My “aw, c’mon” reaction as Reeder breaches some of the world’s toughest security was stifled a bit when Max Allan Collins later provided a plausible explanation for Reeder’s success. The explanation only makes the whole scenario slightly less preposterous, but the book is still fun. Executive Order stretched my willingness to suspend disbelief, but in the end, I enjoyed the story.

RECOMMENDED

A Long Time Dead by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media on September 6, 2016

A Long Time Dead is a collection of Mike Hammer stories written by Max Allen Collins, who took over the franchise after Mickey Spillane’s death. According to Collins, they are based on partial manuscripts that Spillane left unfinished. Whether "partial manuscripts" consists of more than a paragraph isn't clear. In the end, it doesn't matter.

The Hammer that appears in these stories is an older and slightly modernized version of the Hammer who was so popular in the 1950s. He isn’t exactly a feminist, but he is less likely to refer to women as “broads” (not as often, anyway) and he makes a point, in every story, of mentioning that Velda is not just a secretary/lover, but a licensed investigator who carries a gun. Of course, Hammer still has her making the coffee and he still calls women “doll” and “honey,” but he’s making progress. Sort of. But really, would you want Mike Hammer to change?

Here’s what you get:

“The Big Switch” - An innocent man on death row asks Hammer for help. A quick investigation gives Hammer all the reason he needs to have a serious chat with the governor.

“Fallout” - A killer who is after Hammer kills a lobby guard instead. Hammer takes offense. Add a dead hooker to the story and Hammer has plenty of reasons to deliver vengeance. The story is most interesting, however, for Hammer’s unsettled relationship with his police detective buddy Pat Chambers.

“A Long Time Dead” - Hammer watched Kratch as he was electrocuted. So what is Kratch doing checking into a hotel? Leave it to Hammer to find the answer.

“Grave Matter” - Hammer’s old buddy met his death in a town called Hopeful. Hammer wants to know why. The answer is more far-fetched than is common in a Hammer story.

“So Long, Chief” - Hammer does a favor for the dying police chief who steered Hammer away from the dark side when Hammer was just a kid. This is my favorite story in the collection.

“A Dangerous Cat” - Someone is trying to kill Hammer (again). It doesn’t take long before Hammer comes face-to-face with his would-be killer.

“It’s in the Book” - A mob boss has been making entries in a book for years. When he dies, everyone wants the book. It’s up to Hammer to find it and decide what to do about its contents. I like the clever ending.

“Skin” - When Hammer comes across the remains of a woman’s body next to the hand of a missing Broadway producer, he proves himself (again) to be a more capable investigator than the police (in part, by following the path that leads to the body, something that apparently never occurred to the cops). This story, less credible than the others, seems like Mike Hammer starring in an early Steven King story.

All of the stories are entertaining, and they all channel Mickey Spillane’s hardboiled style. Mike Hammer fans, and hardboiled mystery fans, should enjoy the collection.

RECOMMENDED

Fate of the Union by Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens

Published by Thomas & Mercer on November 10, 2015

Max Allen Collins is a prolific, dependable writer. Prolific writers often depend on a formula and Collins (with the help of hsi co-author) used a reliable formula to construct Fate of the Union. The novel follows Supreme Justice as the second to costar security specialist Joe Reeder and FBI Agent Patti Rogers.

Fate of the Union takes place about a decade or two from now, perhaps for the sake of inventing fictional past and current presidents. An old colleague of Joe Reeder on the Secret Service who, like Reeder, retired and began working privately, apparently commits suicide. Reeder doesn’t believe it, in part because he doesn’t believe a guy who carried a gun all his life would hang himself. Reeder’s investigation takes him into an investigation that his friend was conducting, which apparently has something to do with a series of murders, or executions, of apparently unrelated people of different genders, races, ages, incomes, neighborhoods, and sexual identities who were all killed with two bullets in the back of the head. Were they victims of a serial killer? A contract killer? What ties them together and what did Reeder’s friend learn about the killings?

A related story line has Reeder befriending a billionaire who is planning to run for president as a centrist outsider, promising to free the country from the grip of special interest groups. There’s also a rather mild romantic subplot, not that Reeder has much time for that sort of thing.

Reeder is a body language expert, not exactly a profiler but close enough, which is the sort of silly gimmick that usually turns me off. Fortunately, Reeder’s ability to read “micro-expressions” (a phrase that pops up too often) doesn’t overshadow the story.

The plot -- which involves a conspiracy that is standard fare in the world of thrillers -- moves swiftly, but it suffers from a lack of originality. The climactic moment seems too easy for Reeder. It made me wonder “Why did the bad guy do that?” The answer, I think, is that if the bad guy had behaved sensibly, the novel’s ending would not have pleased readers.

The last chapter resolves the conspiracy in a way that is enjoyable but unsurprising. On the whole, Fate of the Union feels like a novel I’ve read many times before. That doesn’t make it a bad novel -- it is well-executed -- but it isn’t special.

RECOMMENDED

What Doesn't Kill Her by Max Allan Collins

Published by Thomas & Mercer on September 17, 2013

While it is written with Max Allan Collins' usual flair, What Doesn't Kill Her is a fairly ordinary revenge novel. It begins with the rape of a teenage girl and the murder of her family members (including her gay brother) by a man who rants about punishing sin and reestablishing God's natural order. The killer leaves Jordan Rivera alive because he wants her to tell his story. Ten years later, Jordan is in a mental health facility. To make sure she does not satisfy the killer's desire, Jordan has not uttered a word since her rape. That changes when she sees on the news that a family was murdered after a teenage girl in the family took another girl to the prom as her date. Are the crimes connected? Jordan intends to find out.

Cleveland Detective Mark Pryor thinks he sees a pattern in certain family murders -- killings from which one family member is spared -- but neither his boss nor the FBI agrees that the killings are related. Coincidentally, Pryor had a high school crush on Jordan before her family was murdered.

Some aspects of What Doesn't Kill Her are less than convincing -- Jordan's development as a superstar street fighter, the speculation by members of a support group that their families were all (perhaps) victimized by the same killer, Pryor's certainty that he sees a pattern in killings that are apparently unrelated -- but the plot is never so outlandish as to kill enjoyment of the story. The romance that develops (or rekindles) between Pryor and Jordan is cheesy and contrived. A plot element that is so obviously manipulative makes it difficult to invest fully in the characters. Not that I would have invested in Jordan anyway, given her one-dimensional identity as She Who Will Avenge.

The killer's present identity is well concealed until Collins drops some obvious clues several pages before the reveal. The ending is inevitable and thus predictable -- this is a revenge novel, after all -- but the path Collins follows to get there builds some tension. Collins always writes with a good sense of pace. While this isn't one of his better novels, it isn't bad. I liked it enough to recommend it (particularly to fans of revenge novels), but I wouldn't put it high on my list of recommended thrillers.

RECOMMENDED